Moscow Preparing for a Major Regional War with the West on Belarusian Territory, Felgengauer Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 4 – Pavel Felgengauer, the independent military analyst for Novaya gazeta, says that the risk of a major war between Russia and the west is greater today than even during the Cold War, the result of Moscow’s military buildup and the West’s response, with a major regional war being fought in and around Belarus being the most likely scenario.

            The analyst presented that disturbing conclusion at a conference organized by the Belarus Security Blog, the fifth such meeting and held in honor of the former defense minister of the BNP Kiprian Kondratovich (thinktanks.by/publication/2019/06/04/pavel-felgengauer-belarus-mozhet-stat-peredovym-rubezhom-protivostoyaniya-mezhdu-rossiey-i-zapadom.html).

            The probability of such a major war, Felgengauer said, is increased by the fact that both sides are now preparing for its outbreak.  He noted that in 2015, Vladimir Putin signed a defense plan for 2016 to 2020, one that remains classified and thus about which many things are not known. But one thing is clear: it assumes that Russia must prepare for a major war in the 2020s.

            Under the terms of this plan, he continued, Moscow has spent a trillion US dollars for rearmament and war preparations. It has increased the number of tactical battalion groups from 68 in 2016 to 126 at the end of 2018.  NATO in contrast has only four tactical battalion groups in Poland and the Baltic countries.

            (The military expert noted that NATO battalion groups are slightly larger than the Russian ones, with 1,000 men as opposed to 700 to 800 in the Russian case, but that difference is more than compensated for by the difference in the total number of such groups between the two sides.)

            Of equal or greater concern, Felgengauer said, Russia has been carrying out exercises testing its ability to move massive numbers of men and materiel into forward battle zones. 

According to the Moscow analyst, the roots of the war danger lie in economics: The Russian economy is in trouble now and is likely to get worse with additional sanctions. There is a sense in the Russian capital that something must be done to get out from under this situation. He suggested that there are “two paths.”

            “One could begin a strategic withdrawal following the path of Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, leaving the Donbass, Crimea, Syria and so on,” Felgengauer says. But “there is a second variant – a strategic advance,” based on creating a situation that will “balance on the edge of a nuclear war,” counting on the West to back down and make concessions.

            “The next two or three years according to the thinking of most will be very, very hot. Tensions will grow” and “Belarus could be transformed into the front line of a conflict between Russia and the West,” the Moscow analyst told his Belarusian audience.

            If Felgengauer is right, Putin’s moves to absorb Belarus into the Russian Federation are analogous to Stalin’s moves via the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to move the borders of territory controlled by Moscow farther away from the Russian heartland, yet another reason why Moscow may have just published the facsimiles of that pact and of its notorious secret protocols.